Mike Dunford
tqa
Posts by this author
May 1, 2007
New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has been released from the hospital 18 days after suffering a large number of fractures in a high-speed car crash. Most, if not all, of the injuries were unnecessary. Had the Governor been wearing his seatbelt, as the other two passengers in the car were, he would…
April 25, 2007
From last night's Daily Show - it's right at the end of the video embedded below the fold.
McCain: You tell any enemy when you're leaving, and they'll say, "Right, fine, we'll just wait until you leave and we'll take over."
Stewart: But that assumes that we're fighting one enemy...
McCain: That…
April 23, 2007
My wife, it would seem, pulled a fast one on me. She was released from her unit in Iraq a few days ago, but she didn't mention that to me. Instead, she just came home. Around 2:45 this afternoon, she called me from the kids school - she had just picked them up and was wondering if I could come…
April 23, 2007
Over the weekend, another "Egnor" post appeared on the Discovery Institute blog. This one addresses a post I wrote two weeks ago discussing the "Framing Science" article. In his "response," "Egnor" manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-…
April 23, 2007
Reality called. He's wondering if you're ever going to get back in touch.
Earlier today, the President met with Gen. Petraeus (the commander of all forces in Iraq) in the Oval Office. The media was there for the photo op, and the President took a couple of questions. His answers were nothing…
April 23, 2007
The theme for today is "accidental humor." In that category, we have a potential television entry later on today, a product that gives new meaning to "invigorating showers," the Kremlin trying to prove that they've got less of a grasp on reality than we do, the President upping the ante on the…
April 22, 2007
This is a repost. Specifically, it's the second of four posts from my old blog about the effects of an invasive insect on an endemic tree in the Hawaiian Islands. I moved the first in the series here last week; the remaining two will follow over the next few days. Once I've moved all of the…
April 20, 2007
John Stewart really got it right on Wednesday - this administration is really making him obsolete. There's no need for commentary anymore - if you want to get laughs, it's just a matter of figuring out which clips to show today. Yesterday's breakthrough accidental comedian was Alberto Gonzales - a…
April 20, 2007
...the times have been,That, when the brains were out, the man would die,And there an end; but now they rise again,--William ShakespeareMacbethAct 3, Scene 4
PZ just drew my attention - again - to Dinesh D'Souza. Both PZ and I were a bit annoyed by his diatribe against atheists a couple of days…
April 19, 2007
Watching Keith Olbermann tonight, I learned that Karl Rove said something nauseatingly dishonest when asked about the decision to go to war in Iraq. When asked whose idea it was to launch a preemptive war in Iraq, Rove replied - and I'm not making this up - "I think it was Osama bin Laden's."
OK…
April 18, 2007
A word of advice for White House staffers: when John Stewart has to take a second or two to tell viewers that he's not making things up, you might have a serious problem:
Stewart: "So far, at least five four-star generals have declined the position, some citing that this administration -- and…
April 18, 2007
A minute or two ago, I posted this with some commentary, but I just decided to pull my own comments from this - it's so surreal that there's really nothing that can be said.
I received the email quoted in full below from the Family Readiness Group for my wife's unit. They got it through the…
April 18, 2007
PZ Myers has an article up calling attention to a recent article by "conservative scholar" and Hoover Institution fellow Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza, in his opinion piece, wonders where the atheists go when bad things happen. As "evidence" for the missing atheists, D'Souza points out that Richard…
April 18, 2007
This is a repost: Unlike some of the folks here, there really aren't that many of my articles over at the old blog that I thought were worth bringing over here. This is one of the exceptions. It's the first post in a series about the effects of a new invasive insect species on an endemic tree…
April 18, 2007
I took a break from doing the morning roundup yesterday, but everybody's favorite least-read morning "things that I don't have time to really blog about so I'm going to blog about in one fell swoop" post returns today. Today's load is actually on the light side. There are a couple more…
April 17, 2007
(I'm not totally sure that he's right, either.)
Yesterday, after looking at the first few posts that discussed things like gun control following the VT shootings, Chad put up a post that semi-politely suggested that this might be a really good time for people to sit down and shut up. I thought…
April 16, 2007
One of my favorite teaching tools has always been the "compare and contrast" assignment. If you've gone through enough school to be able to read this post, you know what I'm talking about. Take two books, or essays, or sets of facts, compare them to each other, and talk about what's the same, what…
April 16, 2007
Today, in Virginia, there was a massive tragedy. Dozens of promising lives have come to an abrupt and unnecessary end. Dozens - hundreds - more lives have been changed forever. All of this has happened because of a single person and his weapons.
There are those in this country who believe that…
April 16, 2007
Rob Knop just wrote an article arguing against new gun control laws. He did this hours after someone went nuts at Virginia Tech and shot a whole lot of people. He did so in the full knowledge that many people would find this to be an incredibly insensitive time to make such an argument. He was…
April 16, 2007
I'm back after taking (unforgivably, I know) another full weekend off from blogging, and as always there's quite a bit to catch up on. In the news since the weekend, we've got some interesting new research on sleep problems related to PTSD, a truly superb Bill Maher piece on "elitism," Rob Knop on…
April 13, 2007
Dr. Michael Egnor, creationist neurosurgeon and Discovery Institute blogger, has a problem. Either he hasn't figured out that we're way past April Fools Day, or he has just managed to produce what might just be the single dumbest anti-evolution argument that I have ever seen. We're talking about a…
April 13, 2007
The big news here today is all about evolution - we've got the rhesus monkey genome and Tyrannosaurus rex protein sequences published. There's also some cool science policy stuff to look at - there's information on abstinence-only sex ed and more manatee material available. Finally, we've got an…
April 12, 2007
In what is undoubtedly one of the more spectacular cases of bad staff work in recent political history, Rudy Giuliani flunked the "Mr. Candidate, what's the going price for a gallon of milk?" pop quiz. (His estimates for the prices of milk and bread were substantially too low, but he was pretty…
April 12, 2007
Senator Daniel Inouye,Senator Daniel Akaka,Senator Hillary Clinton,Senator Charles Schumer,Representative Eliot Engel,Representative Neil Abercrombie,
I am the husband of a currently deployed Army officer stationed in Hawaii, and with a home of record in New York. I'm writing today for two…
April 12, 2007
I took a stroll over to the Campus Center here at UH Manoa a couple of hours ago, and was treated to an interesting sight. UH has been engaged in discussions with the Navy for a couple of years now about the possibility of getting Manoa designated as one of the Navy's University Affiliated…
April 12, 2007
Today, let's start with a note about the title. Yesterday, I got an email from a reader (I'm not sure which of the two of you it was) who was wondering why the "Morning Roundup" appeared on his screen after he got home from work. I think Jimmy Buffett covered that one best when he said, "it's 5 O'…
April 11, 2007
I wrote a little bit about this earlier today, but I was a little too angry at the time to write anything meaningful or coherent. I'm still pretty angry, but I'm going to take another swing at it anyway.
Last night, around this time, I wrote a little rant venting my frustration at the way that…
April 11, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut passed away today at the age of 84.
As John Stewart put it at the start of the interview embedded below, he's the man who made adolescence bearable for a lot of us.
The best Vonnegut quote from the Daily Show interview is, "I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some…
April 11, 2007
The more you look for news, the more you find, I guess. It's another morning with a lot of interesting stuff happening.
In the quick roundup/commentary today, we've got John McCain's brains continuing to liquify and escape, a really embarrassing White House personnel problem (a new one), an…
April 11, 2007
In a just-called Pentagon press conference, Defense Secretary Gates just announced that tours of duty for all Army soldiers in Iraq are being extended from 12 to 15 months. Speaking as someone who has an immediate family member deployed, I would just like to take this brief opportunity to thank…